Tuesday Jan 26, 2010

Over the end-of-year break, I took my first significant vacation in years: a wonderful 3 weeks away from work, and in fact away from most e-mail and quite a bit of time away from all "screens" except the one on my camera. Most significantly, during those weeks I spent ~10 days in Hawaii - one of the favorite places for my wife and me to visit (and the site of my last significant vacation).

My wife, step-son Paul, and I went first to Oahu for a few days. We visited a high school friend of mine and his family (and also his parents, who were in town). We were staying in Waikiki (with a beautiful view from our room) - at the same time as President Obama! We didn't managed to run into him, but heard the sirens of his motorcade in the distance a couple of times.

Near South Point is the town of Naalehu, where my aunt, uncle, and cousin live. Aunt and cousin were away, but it was really nice to spend some time with my uncle Louis. The brother of my father who passed away in 2001, he's the last link I have to that side of my ancestry, and this might be the last time I get to see him in person. We talked for hours, and among other things I learned some details of how my grandmother died. She had a stroke in March of 1985, and we at first thought she was in a "vegetatiave state", and after a short time on life support Louis had her disconnected so she could die peacefully. But she didn't - she took a gasp and kept on living. While others couldn't see it - especially at first - Louis believed she was conscious, and that she was able to communicate with him. After a month of therapy, she was able to move her eyes and her tongue. More physiotherapy later, and she was able to move her arms somewhat, and even stand. Unfortunately she didn't recover further, and she died in August of that year.

I'm sharing this story of my grandmother because of how this history connects with some of my present work. One facet of the AEGIS project that I'm the Technical Manager of is an incredible technology called Opengazer. Opengazer is being developed by Emli-Mari Nell and her colleagues at the Inference Group of the University of Cambridge. It is a multi-year research project to provide eye-tracking using commodity web-cams. As we demonstrated last November to the AEGIS review board in Brussels, as an interim step, Opengazer is now a functioning gesture switch. Emli-Mari has a video of it in action (assuming you have installed the open source VLC player or can otherwise play things in open source Ogg video format). Such technology would have made a huge difference to my grandmother's final months of life, as well as the lives of her caregivers. They could have had rich conversations, utilizing other technologies like Dasher or the GNOME Onscreen Keyboard hooked up to Opengazer. And while solutions exist today that they might have used such as the Tobii Eye Tracker for augmentative communication, these products are very expensive - potentially challenging to justify their many thousands of dollars cost, particularly if at first the doctors don't believe the patient is capable of communication. But with open source solutions like Dasher, GOK, the GNOME desktop, and where we are going with Opengazer, you could put together a powerful communication system for the < $300 it costs for a used laptop with built-in webcam.

But I digress...

I had a tremendous and very full vacation, and am now back at work, preparing for the excitement to come.

The typical underwater digital camera is a housed camera with a flash and perhaps a focusing light (as is shown in this photo of Mark with my old rig + his HID light). The best underwater photos these days are taken with SLR cameras in special custom housings with multiple large flashes. Such a setup can cost more than $10,000! This gets you something like a Canon 5D, a housing for it, and then strobes and arms (ideally 2 strobes!).

For this dive trip, I tried to put together an effective setup at 1/10th the cost. I went with the Canon G9 in order to have something small, but with a bright 3" LCD screen and pretty fast focusing. And then the big experiment: going with the new and incredibly bright 24W HID light from Darkbuster in "video light" configuration (plus diffuser) in the place of a flash. Going this route allowed me to save on buying a bright and expensive flash (the cheapest good underwater flash is more expensive than the Darkbuster!), and meant that I didn't need an electrical sync cord (which requires a more expensive housing and significantly increases your chances of getting a leak) or a fiber optic flash trigger cord (which I haven't found to work that well and getting the right amount of light is always more of a challenge).

I'm pretty pleased with the results, especially for macro photography (check out all of the nudibranch photos). So long as I took the time to adjust the light, and made sure to zoom in a tad so that all of the photo was within the cone of light from the Darkbuster, I got pretty good results. If I do a lot more of this, I'll probably get a second Darkbuster in order to achieve more even lighting results (and use my makeshift "lens cap" - PVC pipe end fitted over the light with holes drilled in for water cooling - to cover one for more dramatic side-lighting - like in this shot). The biggest challenge will still be dealing with surge underwater, which combined with even 1/10th of a second of shutter delay means a high percentage of slightly-out-of-focus photos. My old housed film camera never had this problem...

Wednesday Jul 04, 2007

For the first time in far too long, I took a vacation. My wife and I went to Hawaii. We went diving in Kona with Dive Tek Adventures, snorkeling in Hanauma Bay on Oahu, and we explored the results of Pele's wrath in Puna on the Big island. Here is a brief travelogue, with lots of photos!

We dove with Dive Tek for two days. They were incredibly accommodating, moving their normal 7:30am departure time to to 9am so that we could drive in from Naalehu without having to get up at 0-dark-30 in the morning. They also got us special steel tanks - 116cuft for my wife, and 92cuft for me (as opposed to the normal sized aluminum-80s). This meant our typical dive lasted over an hour (being in 78-82 degree F water, with 3mm full wetsuits helped too).